Anna Burnside reviews 'ambitious show that asks a lot of its intended audience'.
Nightmares are not good. Whether it’s too many puppies, the neighbours’ judging eyes or clowns, we’ve all been there.
In Sho and the Demons of the Deep, however, people don’t just wake up and get on with their day. They dump their nightmares in the river.
This does not end well.
Thankfully a feisty young girl Hannah (a bouncy Rebecca Wilkie) and her grandmother (Christina Strachan) are around to stage an intervention.
This is an ambitious show that asks a lot of its intended audience of children aged eight and over. It works on two levels. There are many literal nightmares in there - toasters with too many buttons, a wolf as tall as a Ferris wheel. In the bigger picture, these represent pollution and the consumer society, the unpleasant junk that we thoughtlessly chuck away.
This point is made by rustling feather boas and cheerleader pompoms made of shredded newspaper and plastic bags. These are worn, brandished, stuffed in bags and otherwise deployed whenever the dark subjects are mentioned.
It all plays out against the story of a town struggling with a river overflowing with nightmares and a three-generation family with their own stuff going on.
Rich material for a generation used to Pokémon with advert breaks.
The clever lo-fi design is a delightful counterpart to shouty cartoons. The set is a series of interconnected boxes that become a spaceship, a bedroom, a staircase. A kitchen window doubles as a miniature stage.
The characters are represented by mundane kitchen objects - Hannah is a soy sauce bottle - which is charming but doesn’t massively add to the narrative.
The cast are impressive physical performers. Itxaso Moreno is adorable as a wee boy obsessed with building different modes of transport. All three switch between characters and voices without pausing for breath. Strachan’s grandmother is refreshingly untwee.
For an adult, there was much to enjoy in Sho. It was chewy without being worthy. There was no preaching, or suggestion that recycling could actually save the world. The end message, that nightmares can be reconfigured as dreams if we change our mindset, managed to avoid being trite.
Did the under-10s get all that? I do hope so.
Sho and the Demons of the Deep tours until June 5, 2024.
Photo by Mihaela Bodlovic.
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